Cosmeticorexia: How girls are falling down a skincare rabbit hole

ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleRuth CleggSenior health reporterBBC "Get ready with me to go to my best, best friend's house," Ellie-May says enthusiastically at the camera. The then 10-year-old smiles and explains her multi-step skincare routine on TikTok. "I love, love, love, love, love this toner," she says, as she rubs the translucent liquid into her skin. Next, it's a serum designed to make your skin glow, "Oh my god it's so glowy," she gushes. She makes a "smoothie" out of her fluffy yellow cream, rubbing blobs on the back of her hand and mixing it with a tinted moisturiser. As she talks, she carefully dabs concealer under her eyes and adds some pink blush and highlighter to her cheeks. Then she curls her lashes and applies mascara and lip gloss. She's ready, she says, well, shortly after she's blow dried and straightened her hair. Ellie-May is now 13. She's been using skincare and advertising it since she was eight years old. What began in lockdown as a bit of fun has become a main source of income for her family. They have social media accounts across Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat. Ellie-May's own TikTok account has more than 330,000 followers. Her mum Sophie, who has five other children, says they make over £50,000 a year from posting content on their various platforms. "Being content creators has transformed our lives," Sophie says as they sit on a video call with me outside their house in the south east of England. "So many other young kids just wanted to know about Ellie's skincare routine and, well, it just took off." Type in the words "children and skincare" into various social media search engines and you won't struggle to find videos of hundreds of other young girls - some as young as three or four - enthusing over skincare products and make-up, or doing "get ready with me" or "after school" skincare videos where they talk about their plans for the day while using cosmetics. Skincare products being marketed to girls is nothing new. While the scrubs and cleansers of past decades promised a spot-free complexion, girls today are using a wider variety of sophisticated products - many of which contain anti-ageing ingredients - in the hope of achieving flawless skin. Some girl skincare influencers describe themselves as "brand ambassadors", showcasing products from the likes of Bubble, Drunk Elephant, and P. Louise. There are K-Pop Demon Hunters-themed skincare packs for a "glow-boosting routine" for "skin that looks luminous". While there are products clearly targeted at children, there are also brands that are popular with young people, which say they do not want to be associated with this part of the market. A source close to Drunk Elephant, for example, says it is not a "youth-focused" brand, and that it is trying to educate its customers about how to use its products responsibly. Bubble and P.Louise did not respond to requests for comment. As well as young influencers like Ellie-May, there are many more young girls who have multi-step skincare routines embedded in their day. A snapshot by Pai, a skincare brand, of 1,500 nine-to-12-year-olds suggests that nearly half are using multiple skincare products weekly, with half of those saying that they use it to fix what they perceive to be problem skin. It has become a multi-billion-pound industry. The market is rapidly growing and it is showing no signs of slowing down. But some - including regulators - are calling for caution. "Women in their 30s and 40s have long been targeted by skincare companies, telling us that ageing is a problem and selling us a solution," Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor and social media researcher at Cornell University, says. "But this is a marked shift. Now young girls are being put under that same pressure." As this industry continues to boom - encouraged by content on social media platforms - is it a bit of harmless fun or are girls being permanently conditioned to think there is something wrong with the way they look? And what does it tell us about how girls today think of themselves? A new term has been coined by dermatologists and academics: cosmeticorexia, which they define as having an unhealthy obsession with achieving "flawless" skin from a young age, leading to an obsessive use of cosmetic products. Prof Giovanni Damiani, an Italian dermatologist from the University of Milan (IT), was so perturbed by what he saw as the compulsion of some of his younger clients he began to investigate what was happening. He interviewed 55 of his patients, aged between 8 and 14 years old. Those who displayed signs of cosmeticorexia, he explains, were mobile-phone obsessed, and would spend hours watching skincare videos on social media. They would also use up to 10 different skincare products daily, and they would not socialise - even with family members - without wearing make-up. The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) has just launched two investigations into the beauty company, LVMH, whi

Cosmeticorexia: How girls are falling down a skincare rabbit hole

Key takeaways

More in top